Democracy Now! Blog

President Obama presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to 16 people in a ceremony today at the White House. Check out Democracy Now!’s past interviews with some of those who received the award:

Imagine the scene. America 2009. Eighteen thousand people have died in one year, an average of almost 50 a day. Who’s taking them out? What’s killing them? Terrorism is not the culprit here: It’s lack of adequate health care.

Though Barack Obama first called the Honduran military’s removal of Zelaya a coup, his administration has backpedaled. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Zelaya’s attempt to cross the Nicaraguan border into Honduras “reckless.” Could well-placed lobbyists in Washington be forging U.S. foreign policy?

Anti-war activists in Olympia, Wash., have exposed Army spying and infiltration of their groups, as well as intelligence gathering by the Air Force, the federal Capitol Police and the Coast Guard. The infiltration appears to be in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus Act preventing U.S. military deployment for domestic law enforcement and may strengthen congressional demands for a full-scale investigation of U.S. intelligence activities, like the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s.

A bipartisan group of six Senators on the Senate Finance Committee has been working in secret for weeks to draft an alternative to President Obama’s plan to overhaul the nation’s healthcare system that does not contain a public insurance option, despite support for such an option from American voters. The Senate legislation was drafted during meetings in the office of committee chair, Max Baucus (D–MT). Last month, the Montana Standard reported Baucus has received more campaign money from health and insurance industry interests than any other member of Congress.

Imprisoned Native American activist Leonard Peltier will have his first full parole hearing in 15 years on Tuesday. He has been in prison for the past 33 years after being convicted of killing two FBI agents during a shootout on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1975. Peltier has long maintained his innocence and is widely considered a political prisoner who was not granted a fair trial. In 2000, we conducted an extensive interview with Peltier from his jail cell:

President Obama said Cambridge police acted "stupidly" in the arrest of leading African American scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in his own home last week. Obama said the incident is a reminder that racism "still haunts us." Check out our extended interview with Gates in 2004 on "America Behind the Color Line."

Henry Louis Gates Jr., who directs Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, knows much about the color line — not only from his life’s work, but from life experience, including last week, when he was arrested in his own home."

Wendell Potter is the health insurance industry’s worst nightmare. He’s a whistle-blower. Potter, the former chief spokesperson for insurance giant CIGNA, recently testified before Congress, “I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick—all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors.”

Nonviolent activists and Muslims are held in draconian conditions, while the man charged with killing Dr. George Tiller trumpets from jail the extreme anti-abortion movement’s campaign of intimidation, vandalism, arson and murder.

The first coup d’etat in Central America in more than a quarter-century occurred last Sunday in Honduras. It was led by a graduate of the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, a military facility that has trained some of Latin America’s worst torturers, murderers and human rights abusers.

Tools of mass communication that were once the province of governments and corporations now fit in your pocket. As these technologies have developed, so too has the ability to monitor, filter, censor and block them.

The Environmental Protection Agency has declared a public health emergency in the town of Libby, Montana, where hundreds of people have died from asbestos contamination. It is the first time such a declaration has been made by the EPA. For decades, W.R. Grace and Co. mined asbestos-contaminated vermiculite in Libby. See extended Democracy Now! coverage

Ken Saro-Wiwa and Alberto Pizango never met, but they are united by a passion for the preservation of their people and their land, and by the fervor with which they were targeted by their respective governments.

Profits are higher than ever at oil companies Chevron and Shell. Yet across the globe, from the Ecuadorian jungle, to the Niger Delta in Nigeria, to the courtrooms and streets of New York and San Ramon, Calif., people are fighting back against the world’s oil giants.

DN! In Depth

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan — The corporate television newscasts spend more and more time covering the increasingly disruptive, costly and at times deadly weather. But they consistently fail to make the link between extreme weather and climate change.